The present invention relates to an armoured guard-house of improved type for protecting one or more sentries.
It is known that because of the increase in terrorist phenomena and common organised crime, guards put in charge of the surveillance of particularly rewarding objectives such as barracks, prisons, important business premises and military concerns must be protected from surprise attack by housing them in armoured guard-houses provided with wide observation windows protected by bullet-proof glass, in such a way as to allow the guards to survey the environment surrounding the guard-house from the interior thereof without being directly exposed to the fire of possible assailants. Known armoured guard-houses have a parallelepiped form with at least one armoured lateral envelope for the protection of the guards, constituted by four walls perpendicular to one another and made of steel and/or masonry and each provided with a wide glazed observation area constituted by a single opening closed by bullet-proof glass of suitable thickness.
The guard-houses described are not free from disadvantages. In the first place the bullet-proof glass which protects the glazed observation areas becomes opaque when struck by a bullet, even if it is not perforated by such bullet; it is therefore only necessary to fire a few projectiles against the glass to render the guards within the guard-house effectively blind and prevent their retaliation through the firing slits with which armoured guard-houses are normally provided. In the second place the flat quadrangular form of known guard-houses offers a wide impact surface to bullets, perpendicular to the trajectory of the bullets themselves thereby facilitating the perforation of the window glass and the armour plating of the guard-house, whilst the transparency of the glazed observation area allows the assailants to take aim through these at the guards housed within the guard-house making injuries certain in the event of perforation of the bullet-proof glass. Since assailants tend these days to utilise FAL-type military rifles provided with armour piercing ammunition the result is that the windows of known guard-houses can easily become perforated thereby nullifying the protection offered to the guards by the guard-house itself.